About

Ever get frustrated with the organization and design of your website? Do you feel like you aren’t making progress during a revamp? Put the URL of the website in the “Wayback Machine” and marvel at the how the website has evolved and changed to become more aesthetically pleasing and usable.

Wayback Machine is a “digital time capsule” created and maintained by the Internet Archive. The archived data comes from “crawls” – computer programs that browse and collect data from the Internet in automation. The collected data does not include information restricted by a publisher or stored in a database. Websites also have the ability to opt out so as not to be included in search results.

When you first open up Wayback Machine, type in the URL and press “Take Me Back”. You will then have the option to pick a year and specific date. You can also see how many times the website has been crawled and the date of the first time it was crawled. Not every website is available on this archive, nor every date. Some websites may have changed in design, but others, like Google, have some of the same basic organization.

As of January 2013, Wayback Machine has information of over 240 billion URLs and over 3 petabytes of data. Although this service has been questioned for legality purposes and copyright laws, it has become especially useful for web designers, and lawyers have even attempted to use some of the archived pages as evidence of a crime. For more information on how Wayback Machine works, visit their FAQ page.

Those of us working in DUX make it our concern to understand the ever-expanding and changing technical needs of library users. As we work through projects like a catalog update and website redesign, always in our minds are the questions: Who are our patrons? What are they already using technology for? What do they need to be able to do? And, how can we help them do these things? There is so much those of us raised in the Internet age expect to be able to do—and to be able to do quickly. It’s difficult to remember a time when technology didn’t inform every part of our lives, and harder still to imagine what it might still have to offer us.

One of my pet procrastinations is exploring the seemingly ceaseless number of cat videos populating the Web. When I find a particularly delightful bit of kitteh kitsch, I gleefully pass it on via Facebook or email, doing my part to ensure the communicable status of those videos we call viral. As a SLIS student, I really should be using the Internet for better purposes—and sometimes I do. Obviously, as a future librarian, I understand, acutely, the necessity of the Internet in our daily lives. The majority of our waking hours find us Internet connected in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons: searching and researching; educating and enlightening and entertaining ourselves; communicating with friends and family and colleagues—both near and far; and, yes, watching and sending videos. For me, all of these things came together in a delightful way when I first saw, a couple weeks ago, this—now-viral—video:

The video gets at the heart of digital user experience. Produced in the mid-1990s, the uses of the Internet espoused by the young cast reads like a prescient laundry list of all we now, some 15 years later, take for granted: shopping, watching TV, making phone calls, and doing our jobs via the Internet. The video’s kids looked forward to this future, and it came right on schedule. That I’m from Helena, Montana, the small town where this video was produced, and am roughly the same age as these kids, makes me even more mindful that technological progress is not some abstraction, is not relegated to some elite community of users, and isn’t years ahead of us in some nebulous haze. It’s now and it’s everywhere, and we’re always going to have to learn how to make best use of it in our lives. The uses we dream about today might seem farfetched, or even silly (“catfood cupcakes,” anyone?), but in 15 years, they’ll seem quaint.